The former head of the intelligence unit at the San Ysidro border crossing pleaded guilty yesterday to lying to an FBI agent investigating a corrupt border inspector who was helping drug and immigrant smugglers.

As part of a plea bargain, prosecutors dropped charges that Daphiney Caganap, 43, of Ann Arbor, Mich., accepted gifts and cash from a man authorities say she dated in return for allowing the smuggling to continue.

Those charges could have meant a sentence of up to 36 years in federal prison.

Instead, prosecutors agreed to recommend probation at a sentencing hearing Jan. 13 and demanded that Caganap resign as head of Customs and Border Protection at the Detroit airport.

She'll also lose her ability to work for the government again.

She was placed on administrative leave when she was indicted in June.

It's unclear from court records exactly what happened.

In court filings in August, Caganap disputed the most serious charges against her – that she accepted a free hot tub, car repairs and between $20,000 and $30,000 in cash from crooked border inspector Michael Taylor.

Yesterday, she admitted that in March, four years after the incidents in question – and after Taylor had already pleaded guilty – she told the FBI agent that she "never went to dinner" with him.

She admitted she "deliberately minimized and hid the extent of her relationship" with Taylor.

While Taylor isn't named in the indictment or the plea agreement Caganap signed, he's identified in papers filed by her lawyer, Thomas Warwick.

Taylor pleaded guilty in November to conspiracy to import marijuana and smuggle immigrants through the San Ysidro border crossing and is scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 31 in San Diego federal court.

Eight other people charged in that case, including the head of a drug and immigrant smuggling ring, pleaded guilty. One man remains at large.

Taylor said to authorities he told Caganap that he was making $15,000 to $20,000 a week allowing smugglers to move with impunity through his lanes, according to court documents.

According to the charges filed against Taylor, beginning in 1999, he used a pager and telephones to alert smugglers which lane he was working, allowing hundreds of pounds of marijuana to enter the country.

When drug-sniffing dogs began catching the drugs before they got to his lane in late 1999, the smugglers switched to people, authorities said.

Caganap learned of an investigation into Taylor in March of 2000, when she supervised the intelligence unit at the San Ysidro border crossing, at the time run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, according to court records.

Taylor told investigators he talked with her, and became convinced she would take money in return for keeping silent and giving him information about the investigation. She denied ever telling him that.

Taylor also said he paid for a $10,000 hot tub, $1,157 in repairs to her Mercedes-Benz and gave her cash. She denied that as well.

She said she won the hot tub in a contest, but the only witness who could testify to that, her mother, died last year.

Caganap said Taylor pursued an intimate relationship, but she rebuffed his efforts. At the time, she was separated from her husband, but the couple has since reconciled.